8192002

[8192002]

I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. “He was on his way home from work—happy, successful, healthy—and then, gone,”

“The Year of Magical Thinking”, Joan Didion

[8192002]

A page was being turned in our history, and you could hear it.

– Albert Vigoleis Thelen, The Island of Second Sight

[8192002]

“You freeze up in childhood, you go numb, because you cannot change your circumstances and to recognize, name, and feel the emotions and their cruel causes would be unbearable, and so you wait.”

— Rebecca Solnit, from The Faraway Nearby

[8192002]

thinking about how the act of bringing someone back from the dead comes from a desire not just to bring back the dead person but to have things return to the way they were before they died. which is, of course, impossible. if a haunting is an open wound, then resurrection is a knife widening the cut.

[8192002]

Victoria Chang

[8192002]

— WENDELL BERRY, “A Meeting.”

[8192002]

— Saeed Jones, from How We Fight For Our Lives

[8192002]

"The earth is not dying. It is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses." -Utah Phillips (1935-2008) folk singer, labor organizer, trainhopper, poet, and ardent anarchist. ID in alt text.

[8192002]

Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

[8192002]

Kaveh Akbar, from Calling A Wolf A Wolf: Poems; “Learning to pray”

[8192002]

“I am still learning how to ask for what I deserve without it also sounding like an apology.”

— Rachel Wiley

[8192002]

[8192002]

“What does the god of your childhood look like? A soft apparition pigeoned in the attic, a wound eating you one year at a time?”

— blud, ‘outhouse’ by Rachel McKibbens

[8192002]

Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Michael Hulse, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

[8192002]

Louis Edouard Fournier (1857-1917), The Funeral of Shelley, 1889, oil on canvas, 129.5 x 213.4 cm. Walker Art Gallery - Percy Bysshe Shelley, the Romantic poet, drowned in 1822 when his yacht was wrecked in a storm in the Gulf of Spezzia, Italy. His body was cremated and his remains later buried at the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Fournier’s painting shows the funeral pyre surrounded by three of the dead poet’s closest friends. From left to right, they are the author and adventurer, Trelawney, Leigh Hunt and Shelley’s fellow-poet, Lord Byron. 

In Trelawney’s own account of the event, ‘Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron’, he described the hot August day on which the funeral took place. Fournier chose to ignore this aspect of the description, depicting the weather conditions as grey and cold in order to accentuate the sombre and dramatic mood of the piece.

[8192002]

That night I knew that I would go to Hell,  and it would be a place just like my room.

—Dana Gioia, from The Gods of Winter: Poems

[8192002]

“Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an “aha moment”. In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit. Or, as John Bowlby so memorably put it: “What can not be spoken to the [m]other cannot be told to the self.””

— Bessel Van Der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma